1. Field of Invention
The present invention relates to the domain of wireless communications, more particularly, to a long-term-Channel State Information (CSI)-aided MultiUser Multi-Input Multi-Output (MU-MIMO) scheduling method, a base station and a user equipment, and aims to reduce the feedback overhead for joint MU-MIMO and multiuser scheduling.
2. Description of Prior Art
MU-MIMO has been shown to provide a great capacity advantage over single-user MIMO (SU-MIMO) in theory. It points out a promising way to solve the throughput bottleneck in wireless communication systems. The potential capacity benefit of MU-MIMO can be increased by orders through a joint operation with multiuser scheduling to exploit the multiuser diversity gain as well as the spatial diversity gain. In such a joint operation, the base station (BS) needs to know the full channel state information (CSI) for all users in the cell, not only for active users selected for service. This will lead to a heavy feedback overhead in frequency division duplex (FDD). When the total user number is large, the feedback overhead becomes prohibitive, which greatly restricts the application of MU-MIMO in practical systems. The aim of invention is to provide a long-term-CSI-aided MU-MIMO scheduling strategy to solve this problem.
Most existing solutions to the above problem adopt the concept of codebook to reduce the feedback overhead. The basic idea is to use a pre-determined codebook containing a set of vectors with unit norm, which is known to both the BS and all terminals, and to provide the BS with a vector index, as well as a real-valued channel quality indicator (CQI), from each terminal. The codebook technique effectively restricts the feedback overhead for each single user, but the overall feedback overhead still grows linearly with the total user number K in a cell, which can be very large when K is large.